Thomas Wieberneit
How a company matured with a little help of Zoho
Early May, technology vendor Zoho conducted its annual signature event Zoholics in Austin, TX. During this event, Marshall Lager and I had the opportunity to have a conversation with Jason Yoffy, director of engineering at RJG, a tr...
Value, not greed! How a business software vendor translates SMB success into the enterprise
Zoho is well known as a vendor for business applications geared towards SMBs. As many other companies do, Zoho wants to support the upper mid-market and enterprises, too. After all, successful SMBs may grow into become enterprises and that might attrac...
Zoho – How a technology company reimagines business software
On May 4, 2023, Zoho held its Zoholics conference in Austin, TX which included a media and analyst track in addition to the customer track. After all, Zoholics is a customer event. During this event, about 80 participants of the former track had ample ...
Generative AI: What’s Next and How to Get the Payoff
Do you know what is the application with the fastest-growing user base ever? Hint: it is not TikTok. This social media phenomenon was relegated to second place earlier this year by ChatGPT. ChatGPT achieved the milestone of 100 million monthly active users in a mere...
How to make efficient use of generative AI
Generative AI is here to stay. It is not only a hype that probably gets worse before it gets better. And we clearly still are in a hype, as the following chart showing the search interest for ChatGPT between October 1, 2022 and April 12,…
How an ISP uses Zoho One to improve outcomes
During the truly remarkable (pun definitely intended) TrulyZoho event I, of course had the chance to talk to some customers. One of these customers was Amit Rai of Tata Fiber, an Indian ISP. As the name suggests, Tata Fiber provides internet services t...
How vendors help generating value with generative AI
The hype around generative AI, in particular ChatGPT is still at a fever pitch. It created thousands of start-ups and at the moment attracts lots of venture capital. Basically, everyone – and their dog – jumps on the bandwagon, with the G...
Truly Zoho – how doing right and capitalism coincide
The past 9 months have seen quite a rollercoaster in the tech industry. We have seen staggering profits, we continue to see stock buybacks, we have seen consolidation, mergers and acquisitions – and we have seen mass layoffs. Few of them were well...
How Business Leaders Can Leverage Generative AI in Customer and Employee Experience
The AI playground has evolved a lot throughout the past year. Conversational AI has made huge inroads. We have seen an increasing number of deployments and through their availability, people get to use them more and more, such as Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, or...
Beyond the hype – How to use chatGPT to create value
Now, that we are in the middle of – or hopefully closer to the end of – a general hype that was caused by Open AI’s ChatGPT, it is time to reemphasize on what is possible and what is not, what should be done and…
How to tie CX to business success in three simple steps
In 2022, the Forrester CX Index dropped for the first time in years, with nearly twenty percent of US brands seeing a drop in customer experience. Towards the second half of 2022, an increasing number of companies fear a recession an...
Social media is dead – long live social media
Rest in peace, Social Media! Yes, I know, you have been pronounced dead numerous times already, and that as early as 2011 by the Sillicon Valley Watcher, if not earlier. You lived on. Still, now you really need to admit that you are a dead…
Three CX predictions and how to get some value from them
At the end of a year and the beginning of the following year all kinds of research organizations and pundits make their predictions. So could I but then, this year I choose to have a look at some predictions and comment on them. After all,…
How to improve CX in times of a downturn
Finally, it happened. We lived in our blissful world of an abundance of money that fuelled the illusion of eternal and unlimited growth. The stock markets knew only one direction for a decade. They were rising and rising. Venture capital was readily...
CRM, CX and Customer Engagement – three humble wishes to better the industry
The CRM Playaz asked me about my take on CRM for 2023. Of course, I happily supplied an answer … So, here we are. CRM in terms of concept and software is quite mature, after all it is around for quite some time. It went through some...
a great human – bot conversation with lots to learn
Inspired by a recent panel discussion as part of the In the Hot Seat podcast that I am involved in, I opened a chat with chatGPT3. ChatGPT is a language model by OpenAI that interacts in a conversational way. This way, it shall be able…
How to create winning industry solutions
One of the terms du jour is „industry cloud“. We hear it even more often than even platform or CX at this time. Why is that? Why do we speak about them only now and not for a longer time? After all, we have seen…
How to make customers for life
On November 10, 2022, SugarCRM held its annual analyst day in the beautiful Chaminade resort in Santa Cruz. In attendance was an elusive crowd of 14 analysts and six customer representatives, along with the SugarCRM executives. We gathered to inform...
How Zendesk Intelligent Triage steps up the customer service game
The News On September 14, 2022, Zendesk announced the release of its new customer sentiment and intent functionality: Intelligent Triage and Smart Assist. These new AI based solutions shall “enable businesses to triage customer support requests auto...
UX and CRM – How to make them a match
When talking about CRM systems, people – especially managers – mostly think about functions, features, and control. How can a process be supported and managed? How can I get good analytics out of the system? Does it fit into the existing IT landscape? ...